The Stats Traditional Media Will Never Show You | EP #131
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So I want to talk about going from fear and scarcity to abundance and optimism. I truly believe that technology is a force that transforms scarcity into abundance over and over again. You know, the perfect example I love giving is we used to go and kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil. Then we ravaged mountains to get coal. Then we drilled kilometers under the ground to get oil.

Technology was increasing access to energy, which was scarce. And now the earth is bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. And we're on the very verge of fusion. There is no energy scarcity. There's lots of energy out there. It's just not in a usable form yet. Technology takes the latent capacity that's out there and makes it usable.

We talk about water wars and water scarcity. We live on a water planet, right? We're a blue-green planet. Two-thirds of our planet is covered by water. The problem is 97.5% is salt, 2% is ice, and we fight over half a percent in our rivers and lakes. But there's technology now that's enabling us to pull water out of the atmosphere or convert that 97.5% saline water

into drinkable water. We just launched a water abundance or water scarcity XPRIZE, it's called, for making water conversion from salt to drinkable more efficient, right? On the last subject, we just launched a healthspan XPRIZE. I want to share with you a few slides in rapid fashion with the intention of helping create for you an abundance and optimism mindset.

Hopefully you've got this longevity mindset from the five days we've just been together and that's been cemented in. Allow me to gift you an abundance mindset. So I want to share what I call proof of abundance. And I was at Singularity University with Neil Jacob Stein and Ray Kurzweil talking about how tech was transforming scarcity into abundance when it hit me, oh my God, the world doesn't think this way.

And so I wrote my first book, Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think, 12 years ago based on this. But here's the data. And every year it gets better and better. So extreme poverty is falling. We've gone from 90% extreme poverty in the world down to under 10%. Global literacy has gone from 15% to over 80%. And we're about to take it to close to 100%.

Kids are in school longer. For me as a dad, and for many of you as parents, this one hits me very close. 200 years ago, it was a coin flip about whether your child survived to age five or not. There are certain countries that don't name their kids until they're five years old because it hurts less if you lose your child. It's down to some 4% today, which is still too high. Global fertility rates are slowing down.

This is important as we talk about longevity and people say, well, the world's overpopulated, at which point you just say, no, no, we're not going to have an overpopulation issue. We're going to have an underpopulation issue. Yes, in the 1950s, we were above five children per family. But what's happened over the last 70 years is the birth rate has dropped precipitously.

You know, the replacement number is 2.1%, or 2.1. And we're now at, you know, 2.4 and dropping. Here you see a breakdown for Africa, US, Japan, Italy, China. Italy is vaporizing, as is China and South Korea and Japan. And as we move technology into Africa, the birth rate there will drop as well.

Global life expectancy has skyrocketed. You know, this is in numbers here. For all of human history, we were living on average into the 30s and we doubled it now into the late 70s and 80s. You know, the tech we're talking about now will take us beyond 100. Will it take us to 150? I hope so, right? That's the whole idea of longevity escape velocity. People think that we don't have enough food on the planet. We have plenty of food on the planet. It's just not properly distributed.

So we've seen daily calorie supply increasing steadily for 70 years. Deaths from malnutrition have plummeted. I mean, when I show you these charts, my guess is this is counterintuitive to what you think, what the media has shared with us. Solar has plummeted in costs orders of magnitude.

At the same time that energy from bio, geothermal, hydro, offshore winds, solar, all of these things are continuing to plummet. Increasing access to electricity. Look at that green line. It's Afghanistan that went from near zero to near 100%. Global access to the internet has skyrocketed. Critically important. At the same time that 86% of the planet

Nearly 7 billion smartphones are out there. And that smartphone means what? It means your child's educator and your healthcare provider, your entertainment, your access to all of the, you know, knowledge in the known universe. I was shocked by this slide. You know, and this ends in the data in 2014, to be clear. And I need to do the research with Safi's help to find more. But the share of people who are happy has been increasing.

I know this isn't true for you, but annual hours worked per worker per week per year has been dropping. We forget that we used to work 80 or 90 hours a week to survive, right? As Saad Giroux told me, technology is the means by which we take a vacation from survival. I found this incredible, right? Democracies are on the rise and the right to vote has been increasing steadily.

Now, you probably are not going to believe this, but the data's here. Conflicts are less deadly. So this peaks in World War II. Deaths per 100,000, including soldiers and civilians from fighting, excluding deaths from disease and famine, has precipitously dropped. Not what you're going to hear on CNN, the crisis news network, right?

This is fascinating. It used to be really dangerous to be alive in the Middle Ages. Homicides are way down. And this is a shocker. Reported crime rates in the U.S. are down 50%. And this is from source data at the FBI. Median income has increased steadily in almost every nation on the planet. And in summary, GDP is exploding on planet Earth.

And as we see AI and robotics come into play, it will grow infinitely. I think one of the most important conversations all of us can have as leaders, as entrepreneurs, as parents, as CEOs is around mindsets. And I want to talk about the mindsets that I think are critical for the world ahead.

And I think it's one of the most important conversations that we can have as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as parents, as leaders. You know, if you look around, it's so easy to forget the extraordinary world we're living in because we get caught up in all the challenges that we have. I love this saying, our ancestors would consider us as gods. You know, this morning we saw Starship fly.

And what that means is the extension of humanity beyond the bounds of Earth in an irreversible, permanent fashion. We saw CyberCab launch. We saw Optimus. We've also been learning about a huge range of biotechnologies that are likely to extend the healthy human lifespan. We saw the work that Max Hodak is doing on restoring sight.

These are all biblical in nature. These are God-like activities that we somewhat take for granted. We're the frog boiling in the water. But every once in a while, it's critically important for us to stop and realize this amazing world that we're in. So let's talk about mindsets. If I were to ask you, what makes the most extraordinary leaders on the planet successful?

Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, whoever you think of as the greatest entrepreneurs and leaders, what made them such incredible leaders? Was it the tech they had? Was it the money they had? Was it the friends they had? What made them amazing, successful leaders? I imagine that hopefully all of you would agree it wasn't those things, it was their mindset. And that if you took away everything from them,

but they retained their mindset, they would regain their success. And so if you agree with me that mindset is the most important asset we have as leaders, the next question I want to ask you is what mindset do you have? And where did you get that mindset? From your parents, from your brother or sister, from your friends, from the TV? And better yet, what mindset do you need for the decade ahead?

And I think most of us don't stop to consider and think about the mindset that we have and what mindset we need for this exponential road ahead. You know, our mindset is how we react to things. Something negative hits you. What's the judo move that you have? If some opportunity comes your way, do you see it as a problem or do you see it as an incredible solution? Right? This is all mindset.

So I want to talk about a few mindsets in particular, ones that I'm super passionate about, ones that I think are important as exponential entrepreneurs. The first is a purpose driven mindset, what I call an MTP or a massive transformative purpose. There's a great quote by Mark Twain that I love. He said, there are two important days in your life, the day that you were born and the day that you found out why. And I hope

All of you connect with this because when you're driven by a purpose, something bigger than you, there is nothing that you cannot do. You know, I've started now 27 companies in my life. On two occasions, I started a company because I thought it was a great way to make money and they both failed. You know, everything from a distance seems like a great opportunity.

And the closer it comes, the more you see the problems, the issues, all of the challenges that exist. And if it's not driven by a purpose, you're going to give up before you succeed. You know, for all the things that I've done at 3 a.m. in the morning, when everything is against me and you've hit failure after failure, unless you're driven by a purpose, you're going to give up. You're not going to keep going. And in...

our businesses, right? You succeed by overcoming hurdle after hurdle. I remember when I was founding Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil on the first day of our graduate studies program, we had a hundred students from around the planet. They had gone through some extremely competitive process to get to there.

the best students out of Stanford and Harvard, MIT, and the University of Tokyo, and the top universities around the planet. And during the course of the conversation, I asked a question, which was, how many of you here are clear about your purpose in life? And I expected all of their hands to raise. And only about a third of them raised their hands. And I was just floored by that.

and i said okay your goal this summer here at singularity is not to learn about exponentials you have one goal find your purpose in life find your massive transformative purpose because it's about intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation it's about understanding why you're on the planet having an mtp is what wakes you up in the morning and keeps you going through the day and

A purpose-driven mindset and an MTP is an emotional energy. You don't cognitively go there. It's you are driven. My favorite saying, it's an old Indian saying, you're driven like a man whose hair is on fire seeks water. I love that.

It can come from two places. An MTP can come from awe and amazement. My first massive transformative purpose was to make humanity a multi-planetary species, and that's what drove me to create my first 10 organizations. But it can also be, rather than just awe and amazement and desire, it can be just anger. It can be a refusal to let this injustice going on in the planet any further.

It's desire is to solve a grand challenge. So getting clear about your purpose is fundamental. There's another reason. We're living in this time where we have every day this massive abundance of opportunities, right? I mean, just in the conversations we've had this week, I mean, huge number of opportunities. How do you sort between them? How do you choose what to say yes or say no to?

right martine rothblatt uh who you might meet next year on the east coast martine is an extraordinary woman uh had a her daughter was dying uh she used to be he uh martin rothblatt and martin had started xm radio and sirius radio and went through his now her sex change

And her daughter Genesis was diagnosed with a fatal pulmonary disease. And Martine quit everything and set out to cure her daughter, which she did. And in the process built a $15 billion company called United Therapeutics. She started with a high school biology book and progressed from there. So when you're driven by the need to do something,

Like Stephanie Strathdee in curing her husband's life, saving her husband's life. You can do anything. Please don't do something just for the money. There's lots of ways to make money. It's about doing something that is driven from the heart.

The next mindset that I care deeply about and built Singularity on and XPRIZE on and Abundance360 is what I call exponential mindset or 10 to the 9th plus thinking. 10 to the 9th plus, what does that mean? It means that you have the ability, if you truly desire, to impact in a positive fashion the lives of a billion people on the planet. That's an incredible statement to make, but it's true.

There are single individuals and none of us are discluded if that's our mission, where you can reach, touch, and support and help a billion people on the planet. That's exponential thinking, right? Ray Kurzweil and I last year were on stage at Abundance talking about this, that we're going to experience as much technical progress in the next 10 years as humanity's had in the entire past century.

between the Ford Model T and the cyber taxi, right? The cyber cab. That's incredible. So how do you think in an exponential fashion? You know, our minds are wired for linear thinking because in the world they evolved in, nothing changed decade to decade

Nothing changed in an exponential fashion. The best you could do was to think in a linear way to look at, can I get to that tree before the lion gets to me? And that's the way our minds are wired. We're wired in a linear fashion. So despite all the exponential changes going on,

Most people cannot believe it when we talk about adding 30 years to your health span. No, don't believe it. Haven't seen it. Or we talk about taking people to Mars. They discount it. And we have to remember that our minds default to linear thinking, but we're in an exponential world. And the only way I know how to think exponentially is

and have an exponential mindset is to constantly be updating what is possible today and extrapolate for a year or six months. And we've seen this in the whole AI world, right? In 1956, there was a conference at Dartmouth University brought together by a group of eight scientists, mathematicians, physicists to talk about artificial intelligence.

And they thought they were going to actually solve it during that summer. Well, it's been a while now, some 60 plus years. And it's just now that we've gotten to a point of AI becoming extraordinary. And back in 1999, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Age of the Spiritual Machines, in which he predicted we were going to hit human level AI by 2029.

So he predicted in 30 years, we're going to hit human level AI. People laughed at him. They said, you're insane. First of all, it's never going to happen. But if it's going to happen, it's going to happen 100 years. Why? Because between 1956 and 1999, there had been little to no progress. And so all they could imagine was that continuing little to no progress. But when you look at exponentials, they're deceptive.

You know, the first digital camera came out from Kodak and it took 0.01 megapixel images, 0.01. The next year it took 0.02 megapixel images, next year 0.04, 0.08. It all looked like zero. And in fact, when Stephen Sasson, the founder, the creator of the digital camera, brought it into the boardroom of Kodak, they said, you're crazy.

You know, we make beautiful higher resolution images. Besides, we're in the paper and chemicals business. There's no money in that here. And they ignored the technology. Well, 10 doublings later, you're a thousand times better. 20 doublings, you're a million times. 30 doublings, you're a billion times. And Kodak is bankrupt. The same things occurred in exponential tech on the AI side.

So all of a sudden, Ray goes from being super, super optimistic to Elon calling him conservative last year. We're seeing the same thing in solar, right? We are just a few doublings away from solar being able to provide all of our energy needs. So exponential mindset is

is not getting stuck in your linear thinking and recognizing that in the early days of any technology, it is slow and incremental growth.

One example as well is the 3D printer, right? The first 3D printer stereolithography, you know, was able to barely print a particular type of plastic that are cross-linked. And today, of course, we are 3D printing rocket engines, we're 3D printing entire rockets, we're 3D printing homes, we're 3D printing everything. Again, you can see the slow progress, right?

All right, let's go to our next mindset, which is moonshot mindset. In this exponential world, I want you to realize that 10%, which is what companies normally are looking for, right? If I could get 10% more revenue, if I could get 10% lower cost of goods sold, if I could get 10% more customers, that would be amazing. And that's what most companies are working towards.

But a moonshot mindset is not 10%. It's 10x, which is 1,000%. So how do you think about getting 1,000% more, 10x more? Bert Rutan, who won the Ansari X Prize 20 years ago, said, the day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. That's a really profound thought.

You know, if it wasn't a crazy idea yesterday, it wouldn't be a breakthrough today. It would be an expected incremental improvement. Going, you know, for a computer that's 20% faster, that's expected. Going from vacuum tubes to chips, that's a breakthrough. So the question is, how do you drive moonshots? How do you think about creating moonshots?

Well, there's an amazing individual, Astro Teller, who's the head of X at Google. And I've had him on stage at the Abundance Summit a number of times. And what we talked about is, listen, if you're a CEO and you want to create a moonshot organization,

It's really important to do two things. Number one, don't kill the goose that's laying the eggs. In other words, you've got an organization that's delivering you 10% profits every year. Keep that organization going. And don't ask them to go and take crazy ideas forward and take on moonshots because you'll disrupt them. That's not the way they think. That's not what you hired them for. But you can create a moonshot organization.

Find those individuals who are disruptive thinkers, who are able to start with a clean sheet of paper and put them in a separate organization with a head who is managing them, who's saying, listen, I don't want you trying incremental progress. If I catch you doing anything incremental, you're fired. You're here to do 10x, a thousand percent. And that team needs to report directly to you as the CEO. Why?

One other thing, that team needs to be physically separated from the main organization. The main organization is going to tell them they're crazy. Every day they're going to say, you can't do that. That's ridiculous. That moonshot group is threatening the very livelihood and existence of your main organization. And so you're going to get an immune reaction within the organization that's going to shut these people down.

I don't care how big you are or how small you are. That immune reaction to 10x thinking is there. So you want to have a CEO of that team that reports directly to the CEO of the primary company. And that CEO needs to give that person top cover and say, I want you trying crazy ideas. I need you trying crazy ideas. And when those crazy ideas begin to succeed,

that new product or service is brought into the main company to be productized. So think about that as an incubator and the main company as the operator. You see this a little bit, for example, when Disney goes out and buys Marvel.

or buys Lucasfilms. They had all of these channels, all of these channels for theme parks and movies, but their creative engine had dried up. So they went and got these skunkworks organizations and moved them in. So that's moonshot mindset. I'll give you one last example there that Astro Teller uses. He says, I want you to imagine that your car company

and your car is getting 50 miles per gallon. If you want your car to get 55 miles per gallon, a 10% increase, you can do that by getting better tires, improving your engine efficiency, changing the aerodynamics. You can work hard to get 10%. But if I asked you to go from 50 miles per gallon to 500 miles per gallon, you can't get there.

incremental progress. You need to start with a clean sheet of paper. And again, this is what we've seen Elon do with SpaceX and with Tesla. He started with a clean sheet of paper and reinvented the entire system. It's the only way you get 10x. It's not incremental, right? So don't try to incrementalize your way to a 10x improvement.

right and that that non-incremental incremental drive that disruptive approach needs to happen outside your main organization so for example when steve jobs created the mac he didn't do it inside of apple headquarters he took a rogue team and he rented out offices miles away he put a pirate flag on top and he said we're the pirates leave us alone

Same thing happened with Lockheed Skunk Works, right? When Casey created the SR-71 and the first fighter jets in World War II, it was done in complete isolation. So there's something to creating a moonshot factory and how you manage that moonshot factory. So can you have a moonshot mindset? Are you prepared to go 10 times bigger versus 10%?

Because you can, and if you don't, your competition will. All right, let's talk about a longevity mindset, which is why we're here all together. You know, there is my favorite quote, life is short until you extend it. We have to remember that the human body was never designed to live past age 30 until 100 years ago, our average life expectancy was 40.

But hopefully you've seen from the technologies, this is a non-linear part of the scientific health world, right? We're at a time where converging technologies are allowing us to go much faster, much further than any time ever in human history. And the more that people become convinced that longevity is real...

and probably the largest business opportunity on the planet, the more they're going to be investing capital. And the more capital that's invested, the more breakthroughs we're going to have. So it's this decade that I think we're in the healthspan revolution.

That it's this decade that these technologies driven mostly by AI, new material sciences, single cell sequencing, CRISPR, gene therapies, all these technologies converging are going to lengthen the healthy human lifespan. But how you think about it is so important because if you don't believe that,

then why would you take care of yourself now? Why wouldn't you just sleep in, not exercise? Why wouldn't you just eat all the desserts you want? Why would you go and upload your body? Why would you do any of these things if you didn't think there was a benefit? I remember when a dear friend of mine died from AIDS six months before the retroviral drugs came out.

You missed that revolution, right? You don't want to be the last person who doesn't get the health span revolution. So for me, a longevity mindset is fundamental. Final mindset, and one of the most important ones I want to leave you with, and I built the entire Abundance Summit around this, is an abundance mindset. You know,

We evolved on the savannas of Africa 200,000, 100,000 years ago in a world that was filled with fear and scarcity. Our default mindset, and this is really challenging, our default mindset when we're left alone in a situation, we default to fear and scarcity. It's how we're wired. And being in fear and scarcity is the worst place to live.

to live into the future. When you're in fear and scarcity, you're back on your heels. You're scared about everything. You're not engaging. You're not learning. You're not creating. So the question to ask yourself is, why is this happening? Why are we seeing all these up and to the right movements? Is it that we're smarter or we have better politicians?

Or perhaps is it the technology that we are engaging in and learning about? So this is what Ray calls the law of accelerating returns, that the amount of computational power per dollar has been growing. And I want you to notice this is plotted on an exponential. And usually an exponential growth curve plotted on a log scale should be a straight line.

But it isn't a straight line. It's curving upwards, which tells us the rate at which the technology is accelerating is itself accelerating, right? We're in a super exponential. We also have the falling cost of all tech is plummeting through the ground. So I'll close on this. Protect your mindset. Careful what you let into your mind to shape your neural net.

I said this before, our brains are neural nets, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections, and they're shaped by everything you read, everything you see, everything you hear, who you hang out with, and how you shape that neural net should be critically important to you. In the same way that we've learned not to eat sugar, to eat your broccoli, what you let into your body shapes your body's health,

In the same way, what you let into your mind shapes your mind's health. So if you agree that your mindset is the single most important thing that you have, choose the mindset that you want. Consume the information that's going to shape that mindset so that when opportunities or problems come your way, how you react to them is set by the mindset that you've created. So,

I'll end it there and say thank you. Make sure you guys get access to all of these slides as well so you can share them with your friends and family. But I can't stress how critically important. So my next longevity book comes out in December. Next year, I have a book coming out called Mindset Mastery that's 80, 90% done online.

And then in 2026, Simon & Sister is going to publish Age of Abundance, which is the follow-on to my first book. And in Age of Abundance, to be clear, all of these trends have continued. But let's be serious. There are a whole slew of negative abundance items. Abundance of obesity, abundance of carbon in the atmosphere,

you know, the challenges of social media. So we'll acknowledge those as well and talk about what is driving them and how to address them. All right. Thank you for your time and attention. I, you know, three minutes comments, mindset hacks that you found useful. How did this land with you? Please.

Thanks, Peter. I think coming to events like this one and to the Abundance Summit really helped reinforce the mindsets that we all try to have for ourselves. It really will go away from this event feeling a lot more positive and with a reset. Thank you, buddy. Thank you. Thank you. Please, Arturo, and we'll go here, Jeremy. I have two. I have two. One is psychological, and the other one is biological.

Psychological one is I made a list of things that I present in present fashion, big things. And first thing that I do in the morning is I read them, I visualize them, and then I read them again. Last thing that I do before going to sleep, same thing. And they have to be 10 or not too many. And it's important that the physical part of reading it, then visualizing it, and visualizing it,

as if you already have it. Yes. And if you want to have something, imagine that you have it, and that you are already doing it, feeling, touching it, feeling, living it. That's the psychological one. The biological one is I have a little alarm in here that I told you. Yes. That every 15 minutes it vibrates, and in that moment I breathe deeply,

exhale slower okay and in that moment i acknowledge anything good it could be as simple as my shoes are comfortable or i love my life constantly being in there right so those aren't my two hacks i love it i love it you know the uh the visualization and the repetitive it is one of the most important things um that we can do right this is uh

the writings of Think and Grow Rich, the fundamentals, for sure. Please, Jeremy. Mine's going to be the hacks that I want to share are energetic. So

There's a quote I really love that is there's two types of people in the world. There's people that need to see something to believe in it. And then there's people that can believe in something before they see it. And so I believe that I believe in magic and I believe we're made of magic. And two secrets I'd like to share about that. One is gratitude is an exceptional energy and mindset. A lot of people say thank you after something occurs. Try saying thank you before it occurs to create it into reality.

That's one. Two, when you hear somebody say something negative or horrible, this is like an ancient magic secret, but you say, I take this out of the law like a prayer, and you energetically remove that. And those are two that I live by. Love it. Love it.

please yeah um first of all amazing presentation i think this is one of the biggest takeaways i think from this five deaths although every presentation was excellent but one of the um slides i took issue with was on the on the issue of democracy because while democracy has been a rise democracies are weaker today than ever before and authoritarianism is actually more on the rise which actually challenges free speech and a free exchange of ideas which actually then

sort of contradicts what we're trying to achieve here by helping to promote a better mindset. And the slide, the data in that slide ends, what's that? Yeah, the slide ends in 2022. Yeah, it drops precipitously over the last four years, for sure. And Safi's working on updating them all. Right, Safi? Yeah. Right. Dale?

Yeah, so I challenge everyone here to stay connected with each other after here. One thing I noticed since joining was that I find that the burdens of everyone around and not having these mindsets that I tend, my mindset tends to drop. And then after I find that I've connected with people that I've met in this world, it all of a sudden jumps back up.

And so, frankly, this is a challenge to everyone to, you know, especially... Maintain the bubble. Maintain it. Thank you, Dale. Let's take last two comments real quick so we can get on next, please. Javier. Well, I just want to say that I feel lucky to be here. I think we all should feel lucky to be here. We're fortunate people. Not everyone can be here, which gives us the responsibility to share this with our communities. Mm-hmm.

We are sharing in the aspect of longevity. You know that we are taking Singularity to Spain because we want to share that with the rest of our country. And I'll see you there in three weeks. So as far as many people told that, for example, longevity is something for rich people trying to live forever, I don't think so. I think that we're just early adopters of a technology that is coming and we have to be ready for that and to share, explain it and share it with the other people. So I challenge everyone to do the same.

Thank you, Javier. Yeah, and I'll just build a little bit further on that, Javier. I think we're such an exceptional group. I think there's a huge wealth gap. And that we should use this technology and our leadership roles to also help other people. So compassion for me is also a hugely important mindset. Thank you. One of the most important things that

that I feel the ecosystem I work within, the XPRIZE, Singularity, Abundance360, is focused on uplifting humanity, right? We have the ability to provide all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education, freedom for every man, woman, and child on the planet. It is very possible within our lifetimes. And that's the XPRIZES that we launch.

It's all about equitable distribution. It's about demonetization and democratization over and over again. We can talk sometime later about a post-capitalism world, but I don't want to go there right now. But yes, I agree. Our mission should be to leave this world in a much better place. And that's what I want to hopefully teach my children and what I hope I can set...

and we can all set as examples.